UCLA has been consistently inconsistent

You won't find Ben Howland taking a polishing cloth to his latest rebuilding project. That's for finishing touches, and his UCLA Bruins still require plenty of work.

"The disappointment to me is that we are not a little further along," said Howland on Tuesday in his weekly Pac-10 conference call.

The disappointment should be that nobody knows how exceptional or how ordinary these young, talent-springing Bruins are. Through three months and 19 games of the season, they've been both.

How they remain ranked in the Top 25 is just as mystifying as the team itself.

Taking every opponent's best effort, the Bruins have gotten better. Then they've gotten worse.

They've been solid. Then they've been sloppy. They won 10 games in a row, including a Jan. 11 victory at USC. Then they lost two of their past three games, getting upset by No. 16 Arizona State and unranked Washington.

They nearly lost the last game they won, edging Washington State, 61-59, last week, and they could possibly lose Thursday night against the smart-shooting, tough-defending, well-coached Cal (16-4, 5-2) at Pauley Pavilion.

Who knows? They are the Bruins, the theatric kings of the great maybe, perhaps and quite possibly surprising and unpredictable.

The Bruins (15-4, 5-2) began the season ranked No. 4, which, Howland conceded, had more to do with UCLA's potential to repeat its recent past of three consecutive Pac-10 titles and Final Four appearances than the Bruins actually being the fourth-best team in the country.

After slipping another four spots in the latest Associated Press poll to No. 17, the Bruins would be lucky to finish fourth in their conference. At 5-2, the Bruins are in a three-way tie for second place, a position about which Howland said, "We were hoping we'd be at least one game above that (conference record) right now."

Hope and recent history are apparently what a lot of Bruins fans have. There is no widespread panic at Westwood about making a fifth consecutive NCAA tournament. Nobody has expressed great anxiety over having non-refundable airline tickets to Detroit for the 2009 Final Four.

"Remember in 2006 when the team was ranked 19th and Howland took the Bruins to the national championship game," said Bruin fan Thomas Simmons, 52, of Laguna Niguel, who was at Pauley for the Jan. 17 Bruin loss to ASU. "It's still early in the season."

But is it, really, that early? By now, the Bruins' games should be more reaffirming of their strengths than revealing of their weaknesses. By now, the team - despite Howland's desire to weld together amalgams of defense-minded, hard-nosed and selfless players - should have an identity.

Past squads had a Mr. Clutch, a go-to guy such as Kevin Love, Arron Afflalo, Jordan Farmar. Today's Bruins are led by preseason All-America senior guard Darren Collison, who is averaging a team-high 14.4 points per game (11th-best in the conference) and a conference-leading 5.4 assists per game.

Howland says Collison is his "go-to guy" but he hasn't been that dependable. Nor have the perplexing Bruins who go up and down within a season, within a game and even within a half.

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